Mulots

In the Maigret story at reference 1, we have a newly retired Maigret, on his way to London for a rare holiday with his wife, holed up in a cheap family hotel in Dieppe, waiting for the weather to break and the ferries to run. His wife having suggested that perhaps he should go out to a café for a bit of company, he sits himself firmly in an armchair and reads an article about mice and moles in an agricultural magazine that happened to be lying about.

As a result of which I learn from Larousse that the long tailed field mouse, in Latin, apodemus sylvaticus, is called a mulot in French, not to be confused with mulet, a mule, the sort of mule you get by crossing a male donkey with a female horse. Also a mullet, as in red mullet.

And then, on the next page of Larousse, I chanced on the musaraigne, claimed by Larousse to be a small mouse-like animal capable of poisoning small prey with its saliva, in the way of the spiders from which their name is derived. I fail to run this one down in the generally reliable Burton (reference 2) and am reduced to the French version of Wikipedia (reference 3). Where it turns out that the word covers quite a range of small animals, mostly but not all true shrews, that is to say of the family soricidae.

Wikipedia goes to some length to explain that the business of poisonous saliva is pretty much twaddle, current since the Middle Ages and possibly to do with the propensity of bites to become infected. Possibly why Burton says nothing about it.

The mouthful musaraigne was sometimes abbreviated to musette, a word with various other meanings, including what passed for discos in France before the second world war. Otherwise the bal musette. Something that nice girls were not supposed to go to. Something else that Simenon knew all about. From an old word meaning a song, and, by extension, a dance.

Reference 1: Tempête sur la Manche - Simenon - 1937 or 1938.

Reference 2: Systematic Dictionary of the Mammals of the World – Maurice Burton – 1962.

Reference 3: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musaraigne.